Vulture Culture!

Bartgeier - Eine Familiensaga

Charlie is a young Bearded Vulture chick growing up among the sheer mountainsides of Switzerland's Engadin National Park. Helped by his family, Charlie will learn how to fly, will watch as his relatives paint themselves in the orange mud that is the preferred make-up of all their kind, and above all: he will be taught how to master the skills of dive-bombing with marrow-bones, his species' unique way to access high-nutrition food. But at the age of two Charlie's dark plumage will become paler, and he will be rejected. Then he must fly away, as far as the skies of Milan or Rotterdam, only to return as an adult. Now he will most likely find another chick in his nest, and it's up to him to find his own mate, and cement the new relationship with the vultures' glorious mating flights. Bearded Vultures were eradicated from the Alps by 1907, but in the 1980s they were reintroduced, and now for the first time in a century, three generations of vultures live side by side.